Please note that all names used are completely fictitious and any thing written is my own personal opinion or knowledge and not related in any way to either my employers or their customers (or Zuken). Also this is not a replacement for proper Maintenence/support and you should read the help files before asking anything techy:).

Monday, 16 May 2011

If you have followed the posts on setting up a schematic template to use documentation symbols and zone links there are a few other things that can be done to further improve them.

You may have noticed a little selection box when starting a new design entitled

"View New Design Settings".

By selecting this you will get an intermediate configuration box before your new schematic opens where you can configure initial settings for the schematic such as the units, grid step and style, colour scheme etc.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011

Now that you have a schematic template prepared, we can start creating a massive schematic over many sheets with oodles of links in them, where by viewing or clicking on the links you can easily find where it goes. I can remember having to draw all over my schematics - marking up what sheet I can find the other end of linked signals - thankfully no more.

Sunday, 8 May 2011

Now that we have documentation symbols (See here) we can start to use them, however in order to not have to setup the symbols & the zones for every schematic we should make a schematic template so that it is setup for each new schematic.

Friday, 6 May 2011

When adding a border to your designs, in order to not be redrawing it every design it should be created as a document symbol. This can be added to both Schematic or PCB designs and easily scaled to fit around the design so it can fit another paper size. Let me explain how to make one that you can use for your drawings.

Wednesday, 4 May 2011

One of the little known features to come into CADSTAR in recent versions is the ability to identify from a pair of signal reference symbols where the each corresponding reference is.

Although only a small thing, this does make it a lot easier to work with diagrams that have lots of signal references shooting off to various parts of other sheets in your drawing set.

Prior to this we would have to put text to identify where you can find the other part of the signal, well now
we have a link that you can click on and it will take the screen to centre in on the other part of the signal.